Burn it, destroy it: Pressure builds on Blair over Chilcot report as it's revealed ministers were told to destroy key evidence on eve of conflict which showed Iraq War was ILLEGAL

Ministers who had a copy of Attorney General's report claiming the war was illegal were told to 'Burn it. Destroy it'
Attorney General Goldsmith told Mr Blair on the eve of the war that it could be challenged under international law
It has long been suspected Labour put pressure on Goldsmith to change his mind, and 10 days later he did a U-turn
Disclosure is one of the most shocking indications yet that Mr Blair and his inner circle were intent on going to war

Tony Blair was rocked last night by a new crisis over Iraq after it was revealed that Ministers were told to ‘burn’ a secret document which said the war was illegal.

The Mail on Sunday has learned how Downing Street descended into panic on the eve of the war when Attorney General Lord Goldsmith told Mr Blair the conflict could be challenged under international law.

The Prime Minister was horrified, and Ministers and officials who had a copy of Goldsmith’s written opinion were told: ‘Burn it. Destroy it.’

Ten days later, with the invasion just days away, Goldsmith did a U-turn and said an attack could be justified. Among those who were told to ‘burn’ their copy was Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, who flatly ignored the order.
Going to war: Former Prime Minister Tony Blair and ex-President George Bush shake hands in April 2002, at the Crawford summit where they are suspected to have signed a 'deal in blood' to wage war on Iraq
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Going to war: Former Prime Minister Tony Blair and ex-President George Bush shake hands in April 2002, at the Crawford summit where they are suspected to have signed a 'deal in blood' to wage war on Iraq

It is also claimed that Mr Hoon threatened to expose such Iraq War secrets when he resisted a bid by Tony Blair to kick him out of the Cabinet. Mr Hoon denied those claims last night. The disclosure is one of the most shocking indications yet that Blair and his inner circle were intent on war, while publicly claiming to be pursuing a diplomatic solution.

It has long been suspected that Labour’s ruling clique put pressure on the Attorney General to come up with a legal opinion in favour of the conflict – an accusation which is being investigated by Sir John Chilcot as a key part of his long-delayed inquiry into the war.

Last week, Sir John announced his report would not be published until June or July 2016.

David Cameron said he was ‘immensely frustrated’ at the length the inquiry, which began in 2009, while Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the time taken was ‘getting beyond ridiculous’.

The ‘burning’ row relates to the 13-page legal opinion presented by Lord Goldsmith to Mr Blair on March 7, 2003, less than three weeks before the outbreak of war.

The opinion – details of which were exclusively revealed by The Mail on Sunday in 2005 – stated that the war was likely to be challenged under international law because of the lack of backing from the UN.

The advice was never released and was kept secret from most of the Cabinet. Only a few powerful aides, such as No 10 director of communications Alastair Campbell, were allowed to see it. Even Chancellor Gordon Brown and Home Secretary David Blunkett were left out of the loop.

A senior No 10 figure at the time told The Mail on Sunday last night: ‘There was pandemonium. The date when war was expected to start was already in the diary, and here was Goldsmith saying it could be challenged under international law. They said “burn it, destroy it” and got to work on the AG [Attorney General].’

Lord Goldsmith’s one-page legal opinion, produced ten days later – and three days before war broke out – stripped out all of his previous reservations and declared the war to be legal. This version was discussed in Cabinet and cited in Parliament to justify military action.

Last night, a source close to Mr Hoon declined to identify the figure who issued the “burn it” order, except to say it was ‘not Tony Blair himself’.

The source said: ‘Geoff received the “burn it” order second-hand. He did not regard it as an instruction to be followed. Downing Street was very keen at the time that the document should not have wide circulation, but Geoff would argue that the remark should not be interpreted as a sign that they were determined to get the Attorney General to rewrite the advice.

‘Peter [Goldsmith] did say in that original advice that as long as certain conditions were satisfied then war was legal, but it did not give an absolutely clear view which could be used by the military. The later summary was much clearer.’
Attorney General Lord Goldsmith told Mr Blair the conflict could be challenged under international war, before doing a U-turn 10 days later
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Among those who were told to ‘burn’ their copy of the Attorney General's report was Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon (pictured), who flatly ignored the order
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Refusal: Attorney General Lord Goldsmith (left) told Mr Blair the conflict could be challenged under international war, before doing a U-turn 10 days later. Among those who were told to ‘burn’ their copy of the Attorney General's report was Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon (right), who flatly ignored the order

The No 10 figure also claimed that when Mr Blair sacked Mr Hoon from the Cabinet in a reshuffle in May 2006, Mr Hoon raised the ‘burn it’ remark – something Mr Hoon denies.

Mr Hoon was furious to be moved by Mr Blair to the non-Cabinet position of Europe Minister – only for Mr Blair to later give him the right to attend Cabinet. It was speculated at the time that the concession was made because Mr Hoon ‘knows where the Iraq bodies are buried’.
There was pandemonium. The date when war was expected to start was already in the diary, and here was Goldsmith saying it could be challenged under international law. They said “burn it, destroy it” and got to work on the AG [Attorney General].
A senior No 10 figure at the time

Mr Hoon was one of Blair’s most loyal Ministers during the Iraq War, privy to secret intelligence and involved in the rows about legal advice. A confidential memo written by the US Embassy in London in 2002, which The Mail on Sunday revealed last month, described Mr Hoon and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as the only Cabinet Ministers who were giving Mr Blair unqualified backing over his Iraq strategy.

Mr Hoon stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Mr Blair during the furore over the death of Government scientist Dr David Kelly, who was the source of a BBC report questioning the ‘dodgy dossier’ into Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Defence Secretary was accused of neglecting his duty of care towards Dr Kelly, an MoD employee, by sanctioning the release of his name to the media.

Mr Hoon has admitted that he could have done more to help the scientist, but was cleared of wrongdoing by the Hutton report into Dr Kelly’s death.

In May 2005, the Cambridge-educated barrister, nicknamed ‘Buff Hoon’ at Westminster, was moved from Defence Secretary to Leader of the House, still a Cabinet position. A year later he was demoted to Europe Minister, taking a £35,000 pay cut. But even though this meant he no longer held a Cabinet post, he still continued to attend meetings in his usual seat next to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott – a decision long surrounded in mystery.

Respected Labour chronicler Andrew Rawnsley wrote in his book The End Of The Party that Mr Hoon was initially so furious about his demotion that he wrote out a resignation statement and planned to make a speech about the Iraq War, including the death of Dr Kelly, which he told friends ‘could trigger the instant downfall of the Prime Minister’. In the event he remained quiet.
HOW BULLYING BLAIR AND HIS CRONIES MANIPULATED LEGAL ADVICE TO JUSTIFY THE WAR PLOTTED AT 'DEAL IN BLOOD' SUMMIT
War 'not justified': Attorney General Lord Goldsmith

1. Bush and Blair meet – and seal Iraq's fate

APRIL 2002: Tony Blair and George Bush meet at Crawford, Texas, where they are suspected to have signed a 'deal in blood' to wage war on Iraq. In a memo revealed by The Mail on Sunday last month, Secretary of State Colin Powell tells Bush that 'Blair will be with us' on military action.

2. Attorney General says war 'not justified'

JULY 2002: Attorney General Lord Goldsmith sends a note to Blair on a single side of A4 headed notepaper saying why he thinks war could not be justified purely on the grounds of 'regime change'. He also says that although United Nations rules permit military intervention for self-defence, they did not apply in this case because Britain is not under threat from Iraq. And he says it would be very difficult to rely on old UN resolutions approving the use of force against Saddam Hussein.

3. Goldsmith silenced as clique takes control

SUMMER 2002: Blair issues instructions to gag Goldsmith, banning him from attending Cabinet and ordering a cover-up to stop the public finding out the contents of the letter. Goldsmith threatens to resign, but Blair and his cronies bully him into backing down.

4. Goldsmith AGAIN says conflict may be illegal

MARCH 7, 2003: Goldsmith produces a 13-page document stating that the war could be challenged under international law. One argument is that individual nations cannot decide if Iraq is in 'material breach' of UN resolutions on disarmament. He also urges caution about going to war without a second UN resolution:

MARCH 17, 2003: Goldsmith gives a nine-paragraph Parliamentary answer summarising his advice, declaring war to be legal under existing resolutions:

MARCH 20, 2003: Baghdad is hit by air strikes and Coalition forces on standby in Kuwait invade.

Despite the Cabinet concession, Mr Hoon started plotting against Blair almost immediately after his demotion. In September 2006, he called on Blair to stand down in favour of Gordon Brown before the 2007 local elections.

Last night, leading international lawyer Professor Philippe Sands QC, of University College London – who eviscerated the Blair Government for its role in the last-minute change of legal advice in his book Lawless World – said: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised in the least about an order to “burn” the advice.

The problem was it had already been distributed more widely, and thankfully so, or we wouldn’t ever have known about the abrupt and unhappy U-turn and the circumstances in which it was procured.’

When contacted by The Mail on Sunday, Mr Hoon, 61, said: ‘I will not be making any comment while the Chilcot Inquiry is still under way, but the remark in question did not come up during my job negotiations with Tony Blair in 2006.’
SIX YEARS TO SEE A MEMO... AND IT'S ALL WHITEWASHED

Confidential communications between Tony Blair and George Bush in the run-up to the Iraq invasion have been released after a six-year battle – but nearly all of the pages have been left blank.

American officials have finally released 13 pages of heavily censored documents in response to a Freedom of Information request made by The Mail on Sunday in August 2009. But the US State Department removed virtually all the information from the papers, rendering them meaningless and reinforcing fears of a cover-up.

Maurice Frankel, director of the London-based Campaign for Freedom of Information, said: ‘It’s been a long wait for next to nothing. The Americans don’t want to risk embarrassing their allies.’

When the State Department finally replied to our 2009 request on October 21, it identified 16 documents, but withheld five over ‘national security’ issues and released another two with what it called ‘excisions’. Incredibly, it said it needed even more time to consider the fate of the remaining documents.

Of the 13 pages released, four are little more than blank pages save for the word ‘Unclassified’.

The documents from 2003 point to a flurry of memos between the US Embassy in London and Washington prior to a meeting between Blair and Bush at Camp David. Although subject headings have been declassified, the substance has not been included – as the large white spaces on the released document, right, show.

American public bodies are supposed to process Freedom Of Information requests within 20 days. The State Department did not explain why this case took so long. It added that ‘redaction criteria include national security, personal privacy, and trade secrets’.

A spokesman for Mr Blair said: ‘This is nonsense as far as Tony Blair knows. No one ever said that in his presence and in any event it would be quite absurd to think that anyone could destroy any such document. Mr Blair and Lord Goldsmith dealt with all the circumstances surrounding the advice at the inquiry at length and with all the documents. The fact is that the advice given was that the action was legal and it was given for perfectly good reasons.’

The spokesman added that Mr Blair had made it clear to the Chilcot Inquiry that the UK would not have participated in the decision to remove Saddam if Lord Goldsmith had not ‘finally been of the view’ that the war was legal.

I am a little puzzled by the Mail's claims. I have a copy of Lord Goldsmith's legal opinion and used it as a basis of a talk I gave to the Australian Institute of International Affairs more than two years ago. That advice concluded that it would probably be illegal under international law to attack Iraq without a further authorising resolution of the UN Security Council. Blair and Bush knew full well that such approval would not be forthcoming.

Between Goldsmith's opinion and the answer he gave to the House of Lords where he expressed the view that such an invasion would be legal, he visited the United States. It is probably a reasonable inference that during that US visit he was leaned on to change his mind. The substantive differences between the original legal opinion and the very brief answer in the House of Lords was probably Goldsmith's way of complying with the pressure but not being willing to give a careful and well argued case that was true of his original opinion. In other words, he was doing as he was told, but sending a subtle signal.

I understand the enormous frustration at the delay in Chilcott completing his report. The Dutch parliament produced a 600 page report some years ago that concluded the war was illegal and the Netherlands should not have been involved. Here in Australia successive governments have refused to even entertain the notion of an inquiry. No doubt because the answers in such an inquiry could render them liable for a trip to the Hague.

Our new issue, “Rank and File,” is out now. To celebrate its release, new subscriptions are discounted.

The recent Iraq Inquiry (commonly dubbed the Chilcot report) was in many respects highly critical of Tony Blair and other key figures in the British government’s decision to follow the United States to war in 2003.

However, it stopped short of accusing anyone of willful deceit in making the case for invasion, and expressed no opinion as to the legality of that invasion.

The 2003 Iraq War was conducted in the face of huge public opposition and mass, worldwide protests. For many people, it threw the nature of Western democracies into doubt and contributed to a collapse of trust in the political establishment. For Iraqis, the invasion was a disaster of unimaginable proportions.

Many questions remain about why the war was launched and, in particular, how the intelligence in support of claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was compiled and presented.

Craig Murray was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004. He was dismissed after revealing evidence that intelligence used by the British government in the “war on terror” had been obtained through torture, with suspects flown to Uzbekistan. Jacobin‘s Duncan Thomas talked to him about Chilcot, the buildup to the Iraq War, and the internal machinations of the British state.

You were UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, before resigning due to certain evidence you uncovered. Can you say a little about how you went from a high-ranking official of the British state to an antiwar activist?

I became ambassador to Uzbekistan shortly after the invasion of neighboring Afghanistan. The British government had a policy of collaboration with the Uzbek dictatorship, which provided an airbase for the Americans to operate into Afghanistan.

However, I discovered that this policy of collaboration not only included downplaying the terrible human rights abuses of that dictatorship, but also intelligence collaboration, by which I mean that our government was knowingly getting intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers, very often from the torture of dissidents who had no connection with terrorism whatsoever.

The purpose of the intelligence was to exaggerate the threat of Al Qaeda from Central Asia — in fact, it’s probably not going too far to say that the purpose was to invent the threat.

Obviously, both the immoral and illegal torture itself and the intelligence obtained from it, as well as the use of that information to paint to a false intelligence picture, was something I just couldn’t go along with.

Were these Uzbeki victims exclusively, or were people flown in from around the world?

At the time, I was only aware of Uzbek victims. I later obtained information, quite literally in a pub from CIA operatives who were engaged physically in doing it, that people were being flown in from around the world.

Initially, I assumed that they were also Uzbek. I subsequently discovered that they weren’t, and that people were being flown in from all over the world who had no connection with Uzbekistan.

It was just being used as an extraordinary rendition destination. But I resigned before I discovered that, and at the time I believed it was just Uzbek victims who were being tortured.

A good enough reason on its own, I suppose. Presumably you tried to raise some of these issues internally before you decided to walk.

Oh yes. I spent a year fighting the office internally without going public. I sent top-secret telegrams to Jack Straw directly on the subject. So I did everything I could to change the policy internally.

I started from the rather naive view that ministers must not know about this, that it must just be rogue elements within Mi6, and that all I had to do was bring it to a sufficiently high level of attention and for it to be stopped.

It really didn’t occur to me at the start that ministers were deliberately getting their evidence from torture.

Before that role, in the 1990s, you were in another position for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as head of their section of the Embargo Surveillance Center. This was responsible for monitoring Iraqi attempts to procure prohibited weapons during the sanctions period.

What was your impression of their capability back then, and was there ever a time when you thought that they may be restarting serious weapons programs?

We were responsible not just for monitoring, but for organizing physical interception of Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement. It was a fascinating job, because you saw how the international arms trade works — or, I suppose, the illegal or sanctions-busting side of the arms trade, as opposed to the legal but still deadly side of the arms trade.

The work we did often involved following the money. We were getting intelligence on specific movements of currency between banks and arms dealers, and between arms traders and arms companies and manufacturers, often arms manufacturers in the imperial United States.

We’d then try to link those payments to particular shipments of arms and see where they were going. This involved both a lot of electronic surveillance and quite literally sending spies poking around dockyards on occasion. So it was very interesting work.

We knew that Iraq had a very substantial chemical weapons program and a very substantial stock of chemical weapons, but we also knew that in large part these were getting very outdated. I should say, first of all, that they were not at all sophisticated.

This is one of the ellisions that Blair and other government spokespeople made quite frequently. When they said WMD or “chemical weapons,” you imagined they were referring to some sort of intercontinental warhead, not just some mustard gas strapped to a regular battlefield missile.

That’s right. But there was no question that they did not have a substantial range and that they were not much use except against massed troops. They were not very much more advanced than standard WWI mustard gas. We also knew that they were degrading — these things have a shelf life, so they don’t stay active.

But the biggest problem that we had, of course, was that they had almost all been supplied by Western arms manufacturers. So we were continually coming up against questions of historic links.

We’d come across bank transfers being made which were for weapons that had been shipped seven years before and just hadn’t been paid for yet. It really opened our eyes to the fact that the West had been arming Saddam Hussein knowingly with all this stuff for years.

In the midst of all that, we had a case that was famous at the time, called the Matrix Churchill case [after the name of the British arms company involved], where Mi6 were actively involved with a Western arms company in a transaction with Iraq which had been ongoing at the time that the sanctions came into force and then continued into the sanctions period.

The company that was supplying the arms stood to make a substantial loss if they simply pulled the plug, and as they had been doing it in collaboration with Mi6, they thought they should just be allowed to go ahead and continue.

But the whole involvement of the West was very cloudy morally, to say the least, and that became very clear through my work.

Concerning how intelligence was presented, Chilcot says:

“The intelligence and assessments made by the [Joint Intelligence Committee] about Iraq’s capabilities and intent continued to be used to prepare briefing material to support Government statements in a way which conveyed certainty without acknowledging the limitations of the intelligence ….

The JIC Assessments contain careful language intended to ensure that no more weight is put on the evidence than it can bear. Organising the evidence in order to present an argument in the language of Ministerial statements produces a quite different type of document.”

To me, this sounds very much like the government was lying or being intentionally misleading, yet Chilcot insists that there is no evidence of willful deceit. You’ve actually gone further and said that not only was evidence misrepresented — some of it was fabricated. Can you substantiate this?

Chilcot says that the JIC assessments were quite carefully worded to put in caveats about how reliable the intelligence was, and that those caveats were removed when it was presented to Parliament in order to make it sound more certain.

I’d say it was worse than that. A lot of material went into the JIC assessments that would never have got through the standard set of filters, had civil servants not been aware that the government really wanted it in.

This was largely conscious and intentional — I think people did it from a sense of “this is what government wants, and I’d better give it them.”

In fact, there were memos going round from senior officials telling people to do exactly that, that we should fix the intelligence to give this impression. I quote one of these messages in my review of Peter Oborne’s book, Not the Chilcot Report. So some of it was explicit. Other bits were simply that you know what government wants, so you give it to them.

And I have to say that, having been a civil servant in a policy department, that’s something you do all the time. It’s kind of natural.

For example, when I was on the Foreign Office South Africa desk during apartheid, everyone knew that Thatcher was very supportive of the existing regime. The official government line at that time was that Mandela was a terrorist and he should be in prison.

There would have absolutely no point in me drafting minutes saying “he is a good man and we should be campaigning to get him out,” because they wouldn’t get anywhere.

So I drafted minutes explaining that it was in the British “business interest” to secure his release, arguing that it would be best not to annoy the black community in South Africa, because one day they might be in power and we would have to deal with them to make money. That’s the only kind of argument that would get anywhere with the government.

As a civil servant your job is to implement the policy the government wants. You can try to do some good by coming up with a financial argument, rather than a moral one, for opposing apartheid or whatever, but you have to go with the flow of what the government wants.

In a sense, that’s what people were doing with the intelligence. If I’ve used the word “fabricated,” that’s probably not quite right. What they did was remove the filters.

In this regard, it’s important to understand that there are two different types of intelligence. There’s “signal intelligence,” known as “SigInt,” and “human intelligence,” or “HumInt.” Signal intelligence is any form of intercepted communication.

At that time, it would have mostly been phone taps and stuff that doesn’t really exist much anymore, like telex and that sort of thing. Not much of it would have been internet-based.

With signal intelligence, unless it has been deliberately faked because they knew it would be intercepted, most of the time it’s simple: what you see is what you get. Human intelligence is very different. Someone is telling you something, and you have to assess its validity.

The vast majority of human intelligence comes from people whose motivation for talking is that they are being paid to do so — that’s how Mi6 works. So you have to assess whether you trust the person, how much access they really have to the relevant material, and so on.

An awfully high percentage of human intelligence is of very low quality, and a lot of it is absolute dross. When you think about it, it’s bound to be. Anyone who’s giving information to a foreign government for cash is by definition not the most scrupulous person. And the information they provide is often unreliable.

In the case of the Iraqi WMD information in the “dodgy dossier,” I know that the source was an Iraqi colonel who was meeting Mi6 in a hotel room in Egypt and was being given literally millions of dollars in cash in a briefcase for the information he provided. There was no corroboration for this — it was was just his word.

Normally, you would put huge question marks over the intelligence he provided and his motive for giving it — as you would with anyone who’s being paid millions of dollars to tell you stuff. So all this intelligence existed, in the sense that people like this Iraqi colonel provided it to us. Whether it was true or false or not is another question.

Normally, there are very strong filters to eliminate this kind of thing. When you sit on committees of the JIC, as I have done, you go through this sort of intelligence. You query it, and you say to Mi6, “This doesn’t seem very credible. How good is your source? Where did he get his access? Why is he telling you this?” And so on.

So very often, before it goes up to a higher level, material will get left out. That’s what the JIC and the sub-committees are for. You can reject things as unreliable.

So normally ministers and the cabinet and so on wouldn’t even see that stuff when it comes to decision-making?

Exactly, it would never get higher. The people able to judge its reliability would take it out. Most of that absolute dross — including the stuff that was taken from somebody’s PhD research [to support claims of WMD] — would have got filtered out.

But there was so much knowledge in the system that the government was already committed to war — and frankly, everyone knew that they were absolutely determined — that people took off the filters. So intelligence that was obvious nonsense was let through.

It had been years since I’d been in charge of the Iraqi weapons procurement brief, but my successors knew that some of the claims just weren’t at all possible. Yet because the filters had been taken off, this intelligence was let through in order to build up a false case. So perhaps not “fabrication” exactly.

But fabricated evidence would have got through. It’s not necessarily the British government themselves that did the fabricating, but they allowed fabricated intelligence to become part of the case. Is that right?

Yes.

This is where a lot of ambiguity comes in between this being conscious manipulation on the one hand, or procedural “error” on the other. For that kind of breakdown of bureaucratic processes to occur, do you need certain individuals who take conscious decisions to remove those filters?

Yes, you do. Definitely in the normal run of things, those filters would come into play. And there were parts of the Whitehall machine which did try to apply normal procedures and talk sense, the main one being the Defense Intelligence Service. The head of the DIS told Chilcot that they weren’t in agreement with the JIC assessment.

There was also a department in the Foreign Office called the Research Analysts Department, who provided expert analysis on whatever subject, and they queried the information quite strongly.

I was actually told by a member of this team directly that he had seen members in tears because they’d been threatened with losing their jobs if they didn’t withdraw their opposition. So yes, there was conscious intimidation going on.

It’s interesting to hear about these conflicts between different parts of the British state machinery. How widespread would you say this was?

Well, there’s no doubt that within the Foreign Office, a large majority of ambassadors and senior diplomats were quite strongly opposed to the Iraq War. We were sending each other private emails and messages all the time about our opposition to it.

At exactly this time, at the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003, I was sending my telegrams from Tashkent on getting intelligence from torture and the fact that the intelligence was rubbish. Those messages were copied to ambassadors around the world as well as Jack Straw.

That was part of our attempt to push back against Mi6 and the government. There was a lot of that kind of resistance. And around 120 former ambassadors also signed a letter opposing the Iraq War, which was also the view of the serving ambassadors.

But one of the fascinating things about all of this was the unwillingness of people to push things to the point of losing their job.

So when do you think the decision to invade was actually taken, and what do you think the motivations were behind it? Was it as simple as the British state trying to secure control over oil resources and other opportunities for British capital?

Was the British state trying to secure relative prestige in the US-dominated imperialist system, or did the United Kingdom have its own distinctive interests to pursue?

It became absolutely clear to me from maybe the spring of 2002 that we were going to invade Iraq.

Motivation is something we all wondered about at the time. It seemed to me to be primarily a matter of Tony Blair’s huge desire for Britain to be seen as a great power and important in the world, and the way to do that was to be indispensably connected to the United States. I don’t think it was much more detailed than that.

So just imperial prestige as an end in itself? Just to appear important?

Yes, I think so. Because if the United Kingdom was an extremely important international player, that made Tony Blair also an extremely important international player. I think it was a sort of dying imperial reflex or something.

Obviously, yes, there were hard-nosed interests in oil and gas and so on, and my guess is that if Iraq didn’t have these resources then this whole thing would never have happened.

But I don’t think that was the driving motivation. It was driven more by this kind of messianic power hunger from Number 10 [the prime minister].

Did any of the conclusions of Chilcot surprise you, and do you think that, despite its obvious limitations, we can use any of that evidence to push things further, ultimately to see Blair charged with war crimes or something like that?

Well, I don’t think there’s enough whitewash in the world to completely cover up what happened. So I’m not surprised that the main outlines of the report are broadly correct.

But I was surprised at how firm Chilcot’s opening statement was. There was much less fudge than I expected.

As to legality and questions of prosecuting Blair and others involved, he said that he didn’t have the power to determine whether it was illegal or not, but that the procedures on the legal advice were wrong. This came as close as he possibly could to saying it was illegal.

So he left the question open, with a strong hint that it was illegal. In this regard, I thought it was much stronger than I expected, given the thoroughly establishment nature of the committee.

On the other hand, I think it was unfortunate that he fudged the question of how the intelligence was put together. He managed to say that it wasn’t the JIC’s fault, because they’d given an honest assessment that had been presented wrongly by Number 10.

But at the same time, he managed to say that the compilation of the dossier itself that presented the intelligence wrongly was also done with good intentions! So he completely avoided the lie that was at the center of this, which is absolutely what I expected.

But within that boundary, the criticisms were very fierce, including the criticisms of postwar planning. I wasn’t surprised by that at all, because that actually fits in with the message that what we have to do is spend more on our armed forces.

But he was harder on Tony Blair and on the decision to go to war, and on the fact the Blair had irrevocably committed to war long before he’d claimed to the public, and of the damage he did to the United Nations through how he went about getting resolutions — all that was much firmer than I thought it might be.

Can we speculate as to why Chilcot was firmer than we thought he might be? Is this, as will be claimed, an example of the British state and the procedures of accountability showing that they are actually functional, or do you think that his firmness was more due to the huge public outrage and mobilization around the war?

Or perhaps even more than that, the divisions within the British state itself, with some parts of the military and intelligence community, for example, being very angry about Iraq?

The Chilcot inquiry made very plain that there were major parts of the British establishment that were not at all happy about what had happened. The main anger and opposition came from the Army, the Defense Intelligence Service, Mi5, and the Foreign Office legal department — which contains some of the world’s most respected public international lawyers, who had unanimously advised that the war would be illegal.

So there are important sectors of the British establishment that were outraged by what had happened, and the power of those parts of the establishment comes through in the report.

But of course, by his avoidance of the problems of the actual preparation or fabrication of the intelligence and the lies told to Parliament, he’s let the security services off the hook. He hasn’t actually criticized Mi6. And most importantly, he’s avoided criticizing anyone who is still a senior government official or telling the truth about the knowing distortion of intelligence.

A lot of the officials who were involved in that are still there. So in a sense, he has focused the resentment on people who are now out of office. That’s an important part of the analysis that seems largely to have been missed.

David Cameron echoed a widespread framing of the report when he suggested that the lessons of the invasion have been learned, and that we’ve already implemented reforms in decision-making processes, etc. The thrust of what he was saying seemed to be that we made mistakes but everything is okay now.

Yet it seems like you’re saying that all of these checks and balances were already there in 2002–3, and that if you looked at the formal procedures, you would have seen what appeared to be a robust system.

So do you think that Chilcot will lead to any meaningful change in the way policy decisions are made, or that such a chance is even possible given the nature of the institutions?

No, and I don’t think there has been any important change, that there’s anything in place that would stop it happening again if we had such a reckless sociopath as prime minister again.

I thought Cameron’s statement was appallingly complacent. I would be very, very surprised if, whatever is said officially, Number 10 hadn’t known all the contents of the Chilcot report for weeks before it was actually published.

But Cameron’s statement sounded like it wasn’t a response to Chilcot at all. It sounded like he was addressing a much less damning report. It was completely inadequate for the criticisms Chilcot came out with.

None of this has been given 10 percent of the scrutiny it should have had because all the coverage has been on the EU referendum and Brexit. There was a two-day debate on Chilcot last week which didn’t get reported by anyone at all.

So no, I don’t think there’s anything in place that would stop this from happening again. Largely this is because of the institutional culture of people wanting to please authority and keep their jobs.

If I think about the torture and extraordinary rendition over which I resigned, for example, there were hundreds of UK officials implicated. Hundreds of people knew that people were being shipped around the world to be tortured.

But as far as I know, I was the only person who entered in writing a formal objection to getting intelligence from torture. And even though, from those hundreds of people, I know that most of them were against torture personally, nobody was actually prepared to lose their jobs to prevent it.

At the end of the day, we have to face the old banality of evil argument. People will do awful things while working for government if government instructs them to do it. And I don’t see anything that’s been proposed that will stop that.

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'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
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Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."

White Man's Burden
The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical

1. The doctrine
WASHINGTON - At the conclusion of its second week, the war to liberate Iraq wasn't looking good. Not even in Washington. The assumption of a swift collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime had itself collapsed. The presupposition that the Iraqi dictatorship would crumble as soon as mighty America entered the country proved unfounded. The Shi'ites didn't rise up, the Sunnis fought fiercely. Iraqi guerrilla warfare found the American generals unprepared and endangered their overextended supply lines. Nevertheless, 70 percent of the American people continued to support the war; 60 percent thought victory was certain; 74 percent expressed confidence in President George W. Bush.
Washington is a small city. It's a place of human dimensions. A kind of small town that happens to run an empire. A small town of government officials and members of Congress and personnel of research institutes and journalists who pretty well all know one another. Everyone is busy intriguing against everyone else; and everyone gossips about everyone else.
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and grit. The philosophical underpinnings of the Washington neoconservatives are the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Edmund Burke. They also admire Winston Churchill and the policy pursued by Ronald Reagan. They tend to read reality in terms of the failure of the 1930s (Munich) versus the success of the 1980s (the fall of the Berlin Wall).
Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to Baghdad? They don't think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when you're scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.
2. William Kristol
Has America bitten off more than it can chew? Bill Kristol says no. True, the press is very negative, but when you examine the facts in the field you see that there is no terrorism, no mass destruction, no attacks on Israel. The oil fields in the south have been saved, air control has been achieved, American forces are deployed 50 miles from Baghdad. So, even if mistakes were made here and there, they are not serious. America is big enough to handle that. Kristol hasn't the slightest doubt that in the end, General Tommy Franks will achieve his goals. The 4th Cavalry Division will soon enter the fray, and another division is on its way from Texas. So it's possible that instead of an elegant war with 60 killed in two weeks it will be a less elegant affair with a thousand killed in two months, but nevertheless Bill Kristol has no doubt at all that the Iraq Liberation War is a just war, an obligatory war.
Kristol is pleasant-looking, of average height, in his late forties. In the past 18 months he has used his position as editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard and his status as one of the leaders of the neoconservative circle in Washington to induce the White House to do battle against Saddam Hussein. Because Kristol is believed to exercise considerable influence on the president, Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he is also perceived as having been instrumental in getting Washington to launch this all-out campaign against Baghdad. Sitting behind the stacks of books that cover his desk at the offices of the Weekly Standard in Northwest Washington, he tries to convince me that he is not worried. It is simply inconceivable to him that America will not win. In that event, the consequences would be catastrophic. No one wants to think seriously about that possibility.
What is the war about? I ask. Kristol replies that at one level it is the war that George Bush is talking about: a war against a brutal regime that has in its possession weapons of mass destruction. But at a deeper level it is a greater war, for the shaping of a new Middle East. It is a war that is intended to change the political culture of the entire region. Because what happened on September 11, 2001, Kristol says, is that the Americans looked around and saw that the world is not what they thought it was. The world is a dangerous place. Therefore the Americans looked for a doctrine that would enable them to cope with this dangerous world. And the only doctrine they found was the neoconservative one.
That doctrine maintains that the problem with the Middle East is the absence of democracy and of freedom. It follows that the only way to block people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden is to disseminate democracy and freedom. To change radically the cultural and political dynamics that creates such people. And the way to fight the chaos is to create a new world order that will be based on freedom and human rights - and to be ready to use force in order to consolidate this new world. So that, really, is what the war is about. It is being fought to consolidate a new world order, to create a new Middle East.
Does that mean that the war in Iraq is effectively a neoconservative war? That's what people are saying, Kristol replies, laughing. But the truth is that it's an American war. The neoconservatives succeeded because they touched the bedrock of America. The thing is that America has a profound sense of mission. America has a need to offer something that transcends a life of comfort, that goes beyond material success. Therefore, because of their ideals, the Americans accepted what the neoconservatives proposed. They didn't want to fight a war over interests, but over values. They wanted a war driven by a moral vision. They wanted to hitch their wagon to something bigger than themselves.
Does this moral vision mean that after Iraq will come the turns of Saudi Arabia and Egypt?
Kristol says that he is at odds with the administration on the question of Saudi Arabia. But his opinion is that it is impossible to let Saudi Arabia just continue what it is doing. It is impossible to accept the anti-Americanism it is disseminating. The fanatic Wahhabism that Saudi Arabia engenders is undermining the stability of the entire region. It's the same with Egypt, he says: we mustn't accept the status quo there. For Egypt, too, the horizon has to be liberal democracy.
It has to be understood that in the final analysis, the stability that the corrupt Arab despots are offering is illusory. Just as the stability that Yitzhak Rabin received from Yasser Arafat was illusory. In the end, none of these decadent dictatorships will endure. The choice is between extremist Islam, secular fascism or democracy. And because of September 11, American understands that. America is in a position where it has no choice. It is obliged to be far more aggressive in promoting democracy. Hence this war. It's based on the new American understanding that if the United States does not shape the world in its image, the world will shape the United States in its own image.
3. Charles Krauthammer
Is this going to turn into a second Vietnam? Charles Krauthammer says no. There is no similarity to Vietnam. Unlike in the 1960s, there is no anti-establishment subculture in the United States now. Unlike in the 1960s, there is now an abiding love of the army in the United States. Unlike in the 1960s, there is a determined president, one with character, in the White House. And unlike in the 1960s, Americans are not deterred from making sacrifices. That is the sea-change that took place here on September 11, 2001. Since that morning, Americans have understood that if they don't act now and if weapons of mass destruction reach extremist terrorist organizations, millions of Americans will die. Therefore, because they understand that those others want to kill them by the millions, the Americans prefer to take to the field of battle and fight, rather than sit idly by and die at home.
Charles Krauthammer is handsome, swarthy and articulate. In his spacious office on 19th Street in Northwest Washington, he sits upright in a black wheelchair. Although his writing tends to be gloomy, his mood now is elevated. The well-known columnist (Washington Post, Time, Weekly Standard) has no real doubts about the outcome of the war that he promoted for 18 months. No, he does not accept the view that he helped lead America into the new killing fields between the Tigris and the Euphrates. But it is true that he is part of a conceptual stream that had something to offer in the aftermath of September 11. Within a few weeks after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, he had singled out Baghdad in his columns as an essential target. And now, too, he is convinced that America has the strength to pull it off. The thought that America will not win has never even crossed his mind.
What is the war about? It's about three different issues. First of all, this is a war for disarming Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. That's the basis, the self-evident cause, and it is also sufficient cause in itself. But beyond that, the war in Iraq is being fought to replace the demonic deal America cut with the Arab world decades ago. That deal said: you will send us oil and we will not intervene in your internal affairs. Send us oil and we will not demand from you what we are demanding of Chile, the Philippines, Korea and South Africa.
That deal effectively expired on September 11, 2001, Krauthammer says. Since that day, the Americans have understood that if they allow the Arab world to proceed in its evil ways - suppression, economic ruin, sowing despair - it will continue to produce more and more bin Ladens. America thus reached the conclusion that it has no choice: it has to take on itself the project of rebuilding the Arab world. Therefore, the Iraq war is really the beginning of a gigantic historical experiment whose purpose is to do in the Arab world what was done in Germany and Japan after World War II.
It's an ambitious experiment, Krauthammer admits, maybe even utopian, but not unrealistic. After all, it is inconceivable to accept the racist assumption that the Arabs are different from all other human beings, that the Arabs are incapable of conducting a democratic way of life.
However, according to the Jewish-American columnist, the present war has a further importance. If Iraq does become pro-Western and if it becomes the focus of American influence, that will be of immense geopolitical importance. An American presence in Iraq will project power across the region. It will suffuse the rebels in Iran with courage and strength, and it will deter and restrain Syria. It will accelerate the processes of change that the Middle East must undergo.
Isn't the idea of preemptive war a dangerous one that rattles the world order?
There is no choice, Krauthammer replies. In the 21st century we face a new and singular challenge: the democratization of mass destruction. There are three possible strategies in the face of that challenge: appeasement, deterrence and preemption. Because appeasement and deterrence will not work, preemption is the only strategy left. The United States must implement an aggressive policy of preemption. Which is exactly what it is now doing in Iraq. That is what Tommy Franks' soldiers are doing as we speak.
And what if the experiment fails? What if America is defeated?
This war will enhance the place of America in the world for the coming generation, Krauthammer says. Its outcome will shape the world for the next 25 years. There are three possibilities. If the United States wins quickly and without a bloodbath, it will be a colossus that will dictate the world order. If the victory is slow and contaminated, it will be impossible to go on to other Arab states after Iraq. It will stop there. But if America is beaten, the consequences will be catastrophic. Its deterrent capability will be weakened, its friends will abandon it and it will become insular. Extreme instability will be engendered in the Middle East.
You don't really want to think about what will happen, Krauthammer says looking me straight in the eye. But just because that's so, I am positive we will not lose. Because the administration understands the implications. The president understands that everything is riding on this. So he will throw everything we've got into this. He will do everything that has to be done. George W. Bush will not let America lose.
4. Thomas Friedman
Is this an American Lebanon War? Tom Friedman says he is afraid it is. He was there, in the Commodore Hotel in Beirut, in the summer of 1982, and he remembers it well. So he sees the lines of resemblance clearly. General Ahmed Chalabi (the Shi'ite leader that the neoconservatives want to install as the leader of a free Iraq) in the role of Bashir Jemayel. The Iraqi opposition in the role of the Phalange. Richard Perle and the conservative circle around him as Ariel Sharon. And a war that is at bottom a war of choice. A war that wants to utilize massive force in order to establish a new order.
Tom Friedman, The New York Times columnist, did not oppose the war. On the contrary. He too was severely shaken by September 11, he too wants to understand where these desperate fanatics are coming from who hate America more than they love their own lives. And he too reached the conclusion that the status quo in the Middle East is no longer acceptable. The status quo is terminal. And therefore it is urgent to foment a reform in the Arab world.
Some things are true even if George Bush believes them, Friedman says with a smile. And after September 11, it's impossible to tell Bush to drop it, ignore it. There was a certain basic justice in the overall American feeling that told the Arab world: we left you alone for a long time, you played with matches and in the end we were burned. So we're not going to leave you alone any longer.
He is sitting in a large rectangular room in the offices of The New York Times in northwest Washington, on the corner of 17th Street. One wall of the room is a huge map of the world. Hunched over his computer, he reads me witty lines from the article that will be going to press in two hours. He polishes, sharpens, plays word games. He ponders what's right to say now, what should be left for a later date. Turning to me, he says that democracies look soft until they're threatened. When threatened, they become very hard. Actually, the Iraq war is a kind of Jenin on a huge scale. Because in Jenin, too, what happened was that the Israelis told the Palestinians, We left you here alone and you played with matches until suddenly you blew up a Passover seder in Netanya. And therefore we are not going to leave you along any longer. We will go from house to house in the Casbah. And from America's point of view, Saddam's Iraq is Jenin. This war is a defensive shield. It follows that the danger is the same: that like Israel, America will make the mistake of using only force.
This is not an illegitimate war, Friedman says. But it is a very presumptuous war. You need a great deal of presumption to believe that you can rebuild a country half a world from home. But if such a presumptuous war is to have a chance, it needs international support. That international legitimacy is essential so you will have enough time and space to execute your presumptuous project. But George Bush didn't have the patience to glean international support. He gambled that the war would justify itself, that we would go in fast and conquer fast and that the Iraqis would greet us with rice and the war would thus be self-justifying. That did not happen. Maybe it will happen next week, but in the meantime it did not happen.
When I think about what is going to happen, I break into a sweat, Friedman says. I see us being forced to impose a siege on Baghdad. And I know what kind of insanity a siege on Baghdad can unleash. The thought of house-to-house combat in Baghdad without international legitimacy makes me lose my appetite. I see American embassies burning. I see windows of American businesses shattered. I see how the Iraqi resistance to America connects to the general Arab resistance to America and the worldwide resistance to America. The thought of what could happen is eating me up.
What George Bush did, Friedman says, is to show us a splendid mahogany table: the new democratic Iraq. But when you turn the table over, you see that it has only one leg. This war is resting on one leg. But on the other hand, anyone who thinks he can defeat George Bush had better think again. Bush will never give in. That's not what he's made of. Believe me, you don't want to be next to this guy when he thinks he's being backed into a corner. I don't suggest that anyone who holds his life dear mess with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush.
Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.
Still, it's not all that simple, Friedman retracts. It's not some fantasy the neoconservatives invented. It's not that 25 people hijacked America. You don't take such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In the final analysis, what fomented the war is America's over-reaction to September 11. The genuine sense of anxiety that spread in America after September 11. It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris.
read more:
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/white-man-s-burden-1.14110_________________www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.orgwww.rethink911.orgwww.patriotsquestion911.comwww.actorsandartistsfor911truth.orgwww.mediafor911truth.orgwww.pilotsfor911truth.orgwww.mp911truth.orgwww.ae911truth.orgwww.rl911truth.orgwww.stj911.orgwww.v911t.orgwww.thisweek.org.ukwww.abolishwar.org.ukwww.elementary.org.ukwww.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/

'.........It became absolutely clear to me from maybe the spring of 2002 that we were going to invade Iraq.

Motivation is something we all wondered about at the time. It seemed to me to be primarily a matter of Tony Blair’s huge desire for Britain to be seen as a great power and important in the world, and the way to do that was to be indispensably connected to the United States. I don’t think it was much more detailed than that.

So just imperial prestige as an end in itself? Just to appear important?

Yes, I think so. Because if the United Kingdom was an extremely important international player, that made Tony Blair also an extremely important international player. I think it was a sort of dying imperial reflex or something.

Obviously, yes, there were hard-nosed interests in oil and gas and so on, and my guess is that if Iraq didn’t have these resources then this whole thing would never have happened.

But I don’t think that was the driving motivation. It was driven more by this kind of messianic power hunger from Number 10 [the prime minister].

Did any of the conclusions of Chilcot surprise you, and do you think that, despite its obvious limitations, we can use any of that evidence to push things further, ultimately to see Blair charged with war crimes or something like that?

Well, I don’t think there’s enough whitewash in the world to completely cover up what happened. So I’m not surprised that the main outlines of the report are broadly correct.

But I was surprised at how firm Chilcot’s opening statement was. There was much less fudge than I expected.

As to legality and questions of prosecuting Blair and others involved, he said that he didn’t have the power to determine whether it was illegal or not, but that the procedures on the legal advice were wrong. This came as close as he possibly could to saying it was illegal.

So he left the question open, with a strong hint that it was illegal. In this regard, I thought it was much stronger than I expected, given the thoroughly establishment nature of the committee.

On the other hand, I think it was unfortunate that he fudged the question of how the intelligence was put together. He managed to say that it wasn’t the JIC’s fault, because they’d given an honest assessment that had been presented wrongly by Number 10.

But at the same time, he managed to say that the compilation of the dossier itself that presented the intelligence wrongly was also done with good intentions! So he completely avoided the lie that was at the center of this, which is absolutely what I expected.

But within that boundary, the criticisms were very fierce, including the criticisms of postwar planning. I wasn’t surprised by that at all, because that actually fits in with the message that what we have to do is spend more on our armed forces.

But he was harder on Tony Blair and on the decision to go to war, and on the fact the Blair had irrevocably committed to war long before he’d claimed to the public, and of the damage he did to the United Nations through how he went about getting resolutions — all that was much firmer than I thought it might be.

Can we speculate as to why Chilcot was firmer than we thought he might be? Is this, as will be claimed, an example of the British state and the procedures of accountability showing that they are actually functional, or do you think that his firmness was more due to the huge public outrage and mobilization around the war?

Or perhaps even more than that, the divisions within the British state itself, with some parts of the military and intelligence community, for example, being very angry about Iraq?

The Chilcot inquiry made very plain that there were major parts of the British establishment that were not at all happy about what had happened. The main anger and opposition came from the Army, the Defense Intelligence Service, Mi5, and the Foreign Office legal department — which contains some of the world’s most respected public international lawyers, who had unanimously advised that the war would be illegal.

So there are important sectors of the British establishment that were outraged by what had happened, and the power of those parts of the establishment comes through in the report.

But of course, by his avoidance of the problems of the actual preparation or fabrication of the intelligence and the lies told to Parliament, he’s let the security services off the hook. He hasn’t actually criticized Mi6. And most importantly, he’s avoided criticizing anyone who is still a senior government official or telling the truth about the knowing distortion of intelligence.

A lot of the officials who were involved in that are still there. So in a sense, he has focused the resentment on people who are now out of office. That’s an important part of the analysis that seems largely to have been missed.........'_________________'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.

'TEHRAN (FNA)- The Iraqi army blasted the US for troubling its Mosul liberation operation through electronic jamming to disrupt the communication among various army units.

“The US army troops have disrupted communication among Iraqi forces participating in the Mosul liberation operation,” the Iraqi army reported.

Iraq’s joint military forces, including the Hash Al-Shaabi (popular forces), started their military operation in Western Mosul on Saturday to recapture Tal Afar and also prevent terrorists from fleeing to Syria.

The Iraqi parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, meantime, confirmed that the advances of the Iraqi volunteer forces to the West of the city of Mosul has foiled the US plot to help the ISIL terrorists to flee to Syria.

“Hashd al-Shaabi’s efforts in the biggest military operation in Mosul city blocked the US aid to senior ISIL commanders’ escape to Syria from the Western part of Mosul city.

The parliamentary committee underlined that Washington intended to repeat the Fallujah scenario and help the ISIL commanders to escape to Syria.

Earlier on Monday afternoon, the first units of the Iraqi army entered the strategic al-Karama region Southeastern Mosul.

Al-Karama is the first region of Mosul city that the Iraqi army has entered after the city fell to the ISIL terrorists in July 2014.

Earlier on Monday, Iraq’s joint military forces kicked off a new round of military operations from three directions towards the Eastern parts of Mosul after seizing control over a vast swathe of land in the surrounding areas of the city in Nineveh province.

“The Iraqi forces started moving towards the Eastern bank of the Tigris river near Mosul city,” the Arabic-language media reported.

The military operation towards the Eastern part of Mosul started on the 15th day of the Mosul liberation operation.

Meantime, the Iraqi sources disclosed that the ISIL has laid mines and stationed snipers on the Eastern bank of the Tigris river.

On Sunday, Spokesman of the Iraqi Volunteer Forces (Hashd al-Shaabi) Ahmad al-Assadi announced that the country’s joint military forces had seized back tens of villages since the start of the Mosul liberation operation about two weeks ago.

“Iraq’s joint military forces have seized back 100 villages from the ISIL on the West of the city of Mosul,” al-Assadi said......'

So the Yanks and their puppets and sidekicks are STILL assisting their 'Proxies', ISIL/IS._________________'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.

The CIA analyst who interrogated Iraq's Saddam Hussein upon his capture in December 2003 believes if the dictator had remained in power, then ISIS would not exist as it does today.

In his upcoming book “Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein,” former CIA analyst John Nixon chronicles the debriefing he had with Saddam upon his capture in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

This judge looked an inmate square in the eyes and did something that left the entire courtroom in tears:
“You are going to fail,” Hussein said to Nixon during the interrogation, according to an adaptation from Nixon’s book printed in TIME. "You are going to find that it is not so easy to govern Iraq. You are going to fail in Iraq because you do not know the language, the history, and you do not understand the Arab mind.”

The interrogation took place after Nixon had been up for 27 hours and was “flat-out exhausted,” according to a book excerpt published in the Daily Mail.

Saddam had been found hiding in a hole in the ground, and Nixon was tasked with identifying that the man captured was in fact the wanted dictator, and to find out where the weapons of mass destruction were.

“Iraq is not a terrorist nation,” Saddam said during the interrogation. “We did not have a relationship with (Osama) bin Laden, and did not have weapons of mass destruction... and were not a threat to our [neighbors]. But the American President [George W Bush] said Iraq wanted to attack his daddy and said we had ‘weapons of mass destruction.’”

“We never thought about using weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “It was not discussed. Use chemical weapons against the world? Is there anyone with full faculties who would do this? Who would use these weapons when they had not been used against us?”
In the TIME excerpt, Nixon comments on the current state of the Middle East and how President Barack Obama’s military efforts against ISIS have made progress, but President-elect Donald Trump will have to create a revised strategy.

Given that ISIS has gained power in the Middle East, Nixon suggests that the militant group could have been stopped if Saddam had been left in control of Iraq.

“…If Saddam had remained in power, Iraq would have eventually gotten out from under international sanctions -- which had already been crumbling by 2001 -- and he would probably be in charge today, preparing one of his sons to take over after his death,” he said.

“Saddam’s leadership style and penchant for brutality were among the many faults of his regime, but he could be ruthlessly decisive when he felt his power base was threatened, and it is far from certain that his regime would have been overthrown by a movement of popular discontent,” Nixon wrote.

Nixon then remarks on how Saddam felt threatened by Islamist extremist groups and would have worked to stop any from taking control.

“It is improbable that a group like ISIS would have been able to enjoy the kind of success under his repressive regime that they have had under the Shia-led Baghdad government,” he wrote. “Saddam felt that Islamist extremist groups in Iraq posed the biggest threat to his rule and his security apparatus worked assiduously to root out such threats.”

Nixon said he found Saddam to be “thoroughly unlikeable,” but that he respected him for the way he was able to control Iraq.

“Before me, there was only bickering and arguing," Saddam told Nixon during the interrogation. I ended all that and made people agree!”

Smoke and mirror BS. We KNOW Saddam was bending over backwards to stop a US attack, from Susan Lindauer. In any 'interrogation', would he not have mentioned this? And as for Saddam supposedly saying 'How on earth could we attack the world with CW, if they had not been used against us ' (paraphrased) is nonsense, because he DID use CW, supplied by the US and other NATO states against Iran, which was the reason he was (to Israel's chagrin) armed with them.

Anyone who buys that book, or buys the narrative in it, needs a Shrink, Big Time. _________________'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABhZQ_VRbsQ_________________'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.

The Saddam interrogation: Ten years after the tyrant's execution, the CIA agent who grilled him reveals the shattering truth... that everything the US thought it knew was WRONG
CIA analyst John Nixon grilled the ruthless dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein
In the course of interrogations, Saddam 'turned our assumptions upside down'
Debriefing The President: The Interrogation Of Saddam Hussein, by John Nixon, is published on December 29
By JOHN NIXON, CIA ANALYST FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 22:09, 17 December 2016 | UPDATED: 16:38, 18 December 2016
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4044216/CIA-agent-grilled-Sadd am-Hussein-says-thought-knew-man-WRONG.html

I had been up for 27 hours and was flat-out exhausted, but the news sent jolts of adrenaline through me like I’d never experienced before.

A Special Forces team hunting the man we called High Value Target No 1 had pulled someone from a hole in the ground. He answered the description.

And my bosses at the CIA were grilling me, the expert.

Could this burly, unkempt man truly be Saddam Hussein, the ruthless dictator of Iraq? The most wanted man in the world?

It was December 13, 2003, and I’d been in Iraq for eight weeks – a CIA analyst looking for leads that might take us to Saddam and his notorious henchmen. That was when I was called to see Buzzy Krongard, the CIA’s executive director.

The war to topple the regime had been going for nearly nine months, yet when it came to Saddam, all we’d turned up were ‘Elvis sightings’, as we called them. Until, that is, troops searching a farm near Saddam’s home village of Tikrit found a large bearded man concealed in a tiny underground bunker.

Now a group of senior officers were quizzing me in Krongard’s office; how, they asked, would I make a definitive identification? I told them about the tribal tattoos on Saddam’s right hand and wrist, the bullet scar on his left leg and that his lower lip tended to droop to one side, something I picked up from studying videotapes.

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Krongard interrupted me: ‘We need to make sure this is Saddam and not one of those body doubles.’

The myth – and it was a myth – that Saddam maintained multiple lookalikes was a source of wry amusement to those of us who worked in intelligence, but I decided silence was the better part of valour and started compiling a list of questions only the dictator could answer.

The military was flying the putative Saddam to Baghdad airport that night and it was decided we’d make the identification there.

In late 2007, I was summoned to give a detailed presentation to George W. Bush at the Oval Office. What kind of a man had Saddam been, he asked me?
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In late 2007, I was summoned to give a detailed presentation to George W. Bush at the Oval Office. What kind of a man had Saddam been, he asked me?

At midnight, after a long wait, the convoy was ready. Men in night-vision goggles drove us at 100mph down the Airport Road, a no-go zone at night. At the airport, a side road led to a series of low-slung blockhouses that once housed Saddam’s Special Republican Guard. Inside, I found pandemonium and another wait until finally a GI said, ‘OK, guys. You’re up.’

Suddenly the door opened and I immediately found myself sucking in air. There he was, sitting on a metal folding chair, wearing a white dishdasha robe and blue quilted windbreaker.

There was no denying that the man had charisma. He was big – 6ft 1in – and thickly built. Even as a prisoner who was certain to be executed, he exuded an air of importance.

Author John Nixon
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Author John Nixon

I spoke first through a translator. ‘I have some questions I’d like to ask you, and you are to answer them truthfully. Do you understand?’

Saddam nodded. ‘When was the last time you saw your sons alive?’

I expected Saddam to be defiant, but I was taken aback by the aggression of his reply: ‘Who are you guys? Are you military intelligence? Mukhabarat [civilian intelligence]? Answer me. Identify yourselves!’

I noted his tribal tattoos and that his mouth drooped. Now I needed to see his bullet wound.

There was so much we wanted to know. How had he escaped from Baghdad? Who had helped him? He would not say, answering only the questions he wanted to.

‘Why don’t you ask me about politics? You could learn a lot from me,’ he barked. He was especially vocal on the rough treatment he’d received from the troops who brought him in, launching a long diatribe.

I was incredulous. Here was a man who didn’t think twice about killing his own people complaining about a few scratches. He lifted his dishdasha to show the damage to his left leg. I saw an old scar. Was it the bullet wound, I asked him. He assented with a grunt – the final piece of proof. We’d got him.

Capturing Saddam was all very well, but now we had to get to the truth about his regime, and in particular the weapons of mass destruction that had been the pretext for the invasion. His response was simply to mock us.

Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein moments after his capture by US forces
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Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein moments after his capture by US forces

Memorable pulling down of the Saddam Hussein statue in '03
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‘You found a traitor who led you to Saddam Hussein. Isn’t there one traitor who can tell you where the WMDs are?’ He warmed to the subject, saying Americans were a bunch of ignorant hooligans who did not understand Iraq and were intent on its destruction.

‘Iraq is not a terrorist nation,’ he said. ‘We did not have a relationship with (Osama) bin Laden, and did not have weapons of mass destruction... and were not a threat to our neighbours. But the American President [George W Bush] said Iraq wanted to attack his daddy and said we had ‘weapons of mass destruction.’

Ignoring his goading, we asked Saddam if he’d ever considered using WMDs pre-emptively against US troops in Saudi Arabia. ‘We never thought about using weapons of mass destruction. It was not discussed. Use chemical weapons against the world? Is there anyone with full faculties who would do this? Who would use these weapons when they had not been used against us?’

This was not what we had expected to hear. How, then, had America got it so wrong?

Saddam had an answer: ‘The spirit of listening and understanding was not there – I don’t exclude myself from this blame.’ It was a rare acknowledgment that he could have done more to create a clearer picture of Iraq’s intentions.

Was he playing with us, twisting the truth to spare his pride?

Debriefing The President: The Interrogation Of Saddam Hussein, by John Nixon, is published on December 29 by Bantam Press at £16.99
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Debriefing The President: The Interrogation Of Saddam Hussein, by John Nixon, is published on December 29 by Bantam Press at £16.99

I asked about his notorious use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish city of Halabja during the Iran-Iraq war. He became furious. ‘I am not afraid of you or your president. I will do what I have to do to defend my country!’

Then he turned to me and sneered: ‘But I did not make that decision.’

We decided to close the briefing. As Saddam left the room, he glared at me. I have annoyed quite a few people in my life, but no one has ever looked at me with such murderous loathing.

My superiors were delighted at the progress we were making, yet something nagged at me about the exchange. My gut told me that there was some truth in what Saddam had said. He was incensed about Halabja. Not because his officers had used chemical weapons – he showed no remorse – but because it had given Iran a propaganda field day.

It was not the only thing that would surprise me. For example, in my years studying Saddam, I never doubted the received wisdom that his stepfather in Tikrit beat him. Many eminent psychiatrists who had analysed him from afar said this was why Saddam was so cruel and why he wanted nuclear weapons.

Yet, in the course of my further interrogations, Saddam turned our assumptions upside down, saying his stepfather was the kindest man he had ever known: ‘Ibrahim Hasan – God bless him. If he had a secret, he would entrust me with it. I was more dear to him than his son, Idham.’

I asked about the CIA’s belief that Saddam suffered great pain from a bad back and had given up red meat and cigars. He said he didn’t know where I was getting my intelligence, but it was wrong. He told me he smoked four cigars every day and loved red meat. He was also surprisingly fit.

The CIA profile of Saddam suggested he was a chronic liar, yet he could be quite candid. Our perception that he ruled with an iron grip was also mistaken. It became clear from our interrogations that in his final years, Saddam seemed clueless about what had been happening inside Iraq. He was inattentive to what his government was doing, had no real plan for the defence of Iraq and could not comprehend the immensity of the approaching storm.

Saddam Hussein meets with military advisors (archive)
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Saddam was quick, too, to deny involvement in 9/11. ‘Look at who was involved,’ he said. ‘What countries did they come from? Saudi Arabia. And this [ringleader] Muhammad Atta, was he an Iraqi? No. He was Egyptian. Why do you think I was involved in the attacks?’

Saddam had actually believed 9/11 would bring Iraq and America closer because Washington would need his secular government to help fight fundamentalism. How woefully wrong he had been.

During our talks, we often heard muffled explosions. Saddam inferred things were not going well for the US forces and took pleasure in the fact. ‘You are going to fail,’ he said. ‘You are going to find that it is not so easy to govern Iraq.’ History has proved him right. But back then, I was curious why he felt that way.

‘Because you do not know the language, the history, and the Arab mind,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to know the Iraqi people without knowing its weather and its history. The difference is between night and day and winter and summer. That’s why they say the Iraqis are hard-headed – because of the summer heat.’

THE ONE SUBJECT THAT MADE HIM CRY

Doting dad: Saddam and Rana
Doting dad: Saddam and Rana

The only time Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein showed any emotion during my interviews was when we discussed his daughters, Rana and Raghid.

His eyes became watery and his voice quivered. ‘I miss them terribly,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed a wonderful relationship with them. They loved me very much, and I loved them very much.’

Saddam also said he was proud of his murderous sons Uday and Qusay, but realistic about their shortcomings. He sometimes found it necessary to punish them.

Uday was a particular problem for him. He said he was incensed when he learned that Uday kept a fleet of Bentleys, Jaguars and Mercedes in a garage protected by Republican Guard soldiers, saying: ‘What kind of message are we sending to the Iraqi people, who must suffer under sanctions and do without?’

Saddam had the cars torched after a drunk Uday shot and wounded Saddam’s half-brother Watban at a family party.

The altercation prompted the 1995 defection of Hussein and Saddam Kamel, the husbands of Saddam’s two daughters, to Jordan.

He chuckled and added: ‘Next summer, when it is hot, they might revolt against you. The summer of 1958 got a little hot. In the 1960s, when it was hot, we had a revolution. You might tell that to President Bush!’

It was several years and several more postings to Iraq before I could explain the realities of Iraq to the President, face to face. By now, Saddam had been tried and executed, finally dispatched in late 2006.

But in late 2007, I was summoned to give a detailed presentation to George W. Bush at the Oval Office. What kind of a man had Saddam been, he asked me?

I told him that he was disarming at first and used self-deprecating wit to put you at ease.

The President looked as if he was going to lose his cool. I quickly explained that the real Saddam was sarcastic, arrogant and sadistic, which seemed to calm Bush down.

He looked at Vice-President Dick Cheney and their eyes locked in a knowing way. As I was leaving, he joked: ‘You sure Saddam didn’t say where he put those vials of anthrax?’ Everyone laughed, but I thought his crack inappropriate. America had lost more than 4,000 troops.

Several months later, I was asked to go back to the White House. This time, the President looked annoyed and distracted and asked for a briefing on the Shia cleric called Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army, then engaged in dangerous insurgency against the coalition. This was not on the agenda.

Trying to gain a few seconds, I said: ‘Well, that is the $64,000 question’ Bush looked at me and said: ‘Why don’t you make it the $74,000 question, or whatever your salary is, and answer?’ What an a***hole!

In his 2010 memoir, Bush wrote: ‘I decided I would not criticise the hardworking patriots of the CIA for the faulty intelligence on Iraq.’ But that is exactly what he did. He blamed the agency for everything that went wrong and called its analysis ‘guesswork’ while hearing only what he wanted to hear.

'BEIRUT, LEBANON (2:00 P.M.) – Video footage has emerged of a large formation of US military helicopters flying past a firebase belonging to Iraqi forces in Kirkuk Province. The footage was taken by an individual Iraqi soldier who adds some controversial commentary, claiming that ISIS only shoots at Iraqi helicopters and not American ones.

The video shows what appears to be the movement of an American air assault battalion past Iraqi positions. Virtually all of the Iraqi soldiers present in the footage a seem jubilant, cheering on the US display. However, the cameraman (himself an Iraqi soldier) makes the remark that if it were Iraqi helicopters, they would be attacked.

This remark most likely has come about with the observation by these local Iraqi soldiers (who are likely stationed near the front with ISIS) of selective engagement by ISIS forces of only helicopters with Iraqi Army aviation markings.

The comment made by the cameraman comes as further evidence that there is a common belief among many Iraqis (and Syrians), true or not, that the United States and the ISIS terrorist group are secretly in cahoots with one another.'

Of course they're in cahoots; two British planes were shot down by Iraqi forces a year or two ago whilst dropping arms to IS, and at least one US helicopter. And when the Coalition gang go in to bomb, I'm sure they tip off the head choppers, so all the planes bomb are helpless civilians (with few exceptions) and infrastructure._________________'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.

'When Russian and Syrian forces were bombarding ‘rebel’-held East Aleppo last year, newspapers and television screens were full of anguished reporting about the plight of civilians killed, injured, trapped, traumatised or desperately fleeing. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, both Official Enemies, were denounced and demonised, in accordance with the usual propaganda script. One piece in the Evening Standard described Assad as a ‘monster’ and a Boris Johnson column in the Telegraph referred to both Putin and Assad as ‘the Devil’.

As the respected veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn put it:

The partisan reporting of the siege of East Aleppo presented it as a battle between good and evil: The Lord of the Rings, with Assad and Putin as Saruman and Sauron.

This, he said, was ‘the nadir of Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria.’ Media reporting focused laser-like on ‘Last calls (or messages or tweets) from Aleppo’. There were heart-breaking accounts of families, children, elderly people, all caught up in dreadful conditions that could be pinned on the ‘brutal’ Assad and his ‘regime’; endless photographs depicting grief and suffering that tore at one’s psyche.

By contrast, there was little of this evident in media coverage as the Iraqi city of Mosul, with a population of around one million, was being pulverised by the US-led ‘coalition’ from 2015; particularly since the massive assault launched last October to ‘liberate’ the city from ISIS, with ‘victory’ declared a few days ago. Most pointedly, western media coverage has not, of course, demonised the US for inflicting mass death and suffering.

As Cockburn pointed out, there were ‘many similarities between the sieges of Mosul and East Aleppo, but they were reported very differently’.

He explained:

When civilians are killed or their houses destroyed during the US-led bombardment of Mosul, it is Islamic State that is said to be responsible for their deaths: they were being deployed as human shields. When Russia or Syria targets buildings in East Aleppo, Russia or Syria is blamed: the rebels have nothing to do with it.

For example:

Heartrending images from East Aleppo showing dead, wounded and shellshocked children were broadcast around the world. But when, on 12 January, a video was posted online showing people searching for bodies in the ruins of a building in Mosul that appeared to have been destroyed by a US-led coalition airstrike, no Western television station carried the pictures.

Cockburn summarised:

In Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi army and their air support are largely given a free pass. […] Contrast this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of President Assad’s forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians regardless of whether they stay or try to flee.

Mopping Up Pockets of Resistance

In October 2016, the US-led coalition stepped up its bombing raids and artillery attacks on Mosul, over and above what had already been an intensive military campaign following the city’s capture by ISIS in 2014. According to a new report by Amnesty, 5,805 civilians were killed as a result of attacks launched by the coalition between February and June of 2017. As with Iraq Body Count figures for the whole of the country, this figure is likely to be much too low. Moreover, it excludes the first few months and the final few weeks of intensive bombardment.

Amnesty says that the people of Mosul were subjected to:

a terrifying barrage of fire from weapons that should never be used in densely populated civilian areas.

US political writer Bill Van Auken comments:

In Amnesty’s typically cautious fashion in dealing with the US government, the report stated that “US-led coalition forces appear to have committed repeated violations of international law, some of which may amount to war crimes.”

Van Auken adds:

While Amnesty indicts ISIS with far greater conviction than it does the US military, it raises no questions as to who is responsible for ISIS in the first place, much less the historical roots of the human catastrophe inflicted upon Mosul.

As informed people are all too aware:

ISIS had been well-armed, funded and trained for use as a proxy force in the wars for regime change orchestrated by the CIA and Washington’s regional allies, first in Libya and then in Syria.

This is all part of a bigger picture involving decades of:

war, sanctions, invasion and occupation inflicted by US imperialism on the oil-rich country, resulting in the decimation of an entire society, the loss of well over a million lives, and the turning of millions more into homeless refugees.

Media coverage of the ‘victory’ over ISIS in Mosul has omitted this history, of course; just as it has either ignored or downplayed the huge numbers of civilians killed by the coalition there. True, there are now reports emerging of the plight of civilians leaving Mosul, and the BBC has noted Amnesty ‘allegations’, while giving prominent space to a coalition spokesperson dismissing the Amnesty report as ‘irresponsible and an insult’. But if BBC News was genuinely impartial, for the past few months it would have regularly headlined the destruction wreaked by the US-led coalition, with particular emphasis on the massive civilian death toll. Instead, this BBC headline said so much about its coalition-friendly stance:

Battle for Mosul: Iraq army mops up final IS pockets.

The article’s opening line was:

The Iraqi army has been mopping up the last pockets of resistance from Islamic State (IS) militants in Mosul, after a long battle to recapture the city.

And how many civilians had been killed by these US-backed forces in ‘liberating’ the city? The piece did not say.

On March 17 this year, as many as 240 civilians were killed in an air strike on Mosul by the coalition. Patrick Cockburn reported that three buildings were reduced to rubble, while many people were seeking refuge in cellars.

For months before and after this atrocity, BBC News had featured several reports from its correspondent Jonathan Beale who was ’embedded’ with Iraqi troops. These pieces had titles like ‘On the ground with Iraqi forces in battle for Mosul’, and they were sprinkled with propaganda phrases such as:

The US-led coalition appears confident that fighters of the so-called Islamic State (IS) will be defeated in Mosul.

a brutal fight for every street.

The troops both battle hardened and battle weary.

We hear coalition aircraft overhead. Then a whoosh and a thud, followed by an explosion…There’s another whoosh, thud and boom and then a plume of smoke from an air strike.

No-one can question the bravery of the Iraqi forces.

this is unforgiving, urban warfare and for the Iraqi forces there is still a mountain to climb.

This was a bang-bang style of ‘journalism’ that obscured or blanked the deaths of civilians being killed in the ‘Battle for Mosul’, as the BBC News television studio graphic called the massive bombardment, time after time, for months on end. It was always ‘Battle for Mosul’; never ‘US air strike massacres civilians’ or ‘US seeks hegemony in the Middle East’. It’s Good (‘Us’) vs Evil (‘Them’). The BBC website offered a single article, titled ‘Can civilian deaths be avoided in RAF strikes on IS?’, as a pitiful ‘balance’ to the rolling barrage of pro-coalition propaganda. Tellingly, Beale’s piece revealed its propaganda stance in closing with the perspective of RAF Air Commodore Johnny Stringer who said:

We have an opponent who just hates us and everything we stand for. We have to deal with that and defeat them militarily. And that is why we’re here.

Beale ended the article with a line of his own, indicating that the BBC correspondent stood full-square behind the coalition:

They are fighting a brutal enemy, who unlike them, has no worries about killing civilians.

Once the ‘last pockets of resistance’ in Mosul had been ‘mopped up’, the BBC could then publish a typically whitewashing report on its website headlined, ‘Mosul: Iraq PM in city to celebrate victory over IS’. And, of course, no questions were asked about the democratic credentials of the Iraqi government that had ‘liberated’ Mosul. Does Iraq have free elections, a free press and full respect for human rights? These issues have been of little or no concern for the corporate media since a puppet government was installed, amid much PR posturing, in 2004.

‘A Heroic Fight Against Terrorists”

The propaganda pitch of BBC News towards government power is longstanding; indeed it was hard-wired from its Reithian origins, as we have pointed out many times. Sometimes this propaganda bias is most obvious when its news reporters examine the propaganda of Official Enemies, blithely unaware of how it reflects on themselves and their own employer.

On December 15, 2016, Moscow correspondent Sarah Rainsford delivered a classic example on Aleppo in this segment shown on BBC News at One (the BBC also published this article).

Consider her words:

On the ground in Syria, Russia’s special forces – shown here for the first time on state television. The commentary is all about a heroic fight against terrorists. No mention here of any civilians caught up in the bloodshed.

Imagine Rainsford saying this of Western reporting on Mosul:

The commentary is all about a heroic fight against terrorists. No mention here of any civilians caught up in the bloodshed.

Then, to camera, Rainsford said:

For Russia, the conflict in Syria was always about projecting its power and influence. As the West stalled [sic], Moscow moved in. The message to Russians here that they were helping to protect the world from terrorism. The message to the world, that Russia under Vladimir Putin is a political and military power to be reckoned with.

A BBC News reporter would never point out that war in the Middle East is about the US ‘projecting its power and influence’.

Rainsford continued, over library footage of the severe damage done by Russian forces to Grozny:

As to brutal bombing campaigns, Russia has done that before. This is not Aleppo, but Grozny in Chechnya – a city flattened in what President Putin also called a war on terror. In this latest conflict, he’s faced no calls at home for restraint.

Finally, over a clip of ISIS fighters with captured Russian arsenal at Palmyra:

But, with all the focus on Aleppo, this happened. Russian troops were forced to abandon their positions in Palmyra, as militants from ISIS moved in. Recapturing this Syrian city was also once trumpeted by Russia as a great victory.

Can you imagine BBC News ever doing a comparable segment analysing US or British propaganda about the assault on Mosul? Or Sirte in Libya? Or Fallujah? Or Belgrade? Have BBC News journalists not, in fact, effectively ‘trumpeted’ each of these ‘as a great victory’ for the West?

So, it is a worthy task for the BBC to critically assess the propaganda of the evil enemy, but not that of ‘our’ own side. Another standard feature of BBC News, as with all corporate media, is to identify with the victims of Official Enemy military action, far more than with victims of ‘our’ military action. Thus, last year, Bridget Kendall, could report in this fashion for the BBC:

What looks like a Russian fighter jet in the skies over northern Syria. And then this. Suspected cluster bombs. Imagine being in one of those buildings, apparently north of the city of Aleppo yesterday.’ (BBC News at Ten, February 1, 2016; clip captured by Media Lens reader Daniel Collins in this tweet; our emphasis)

A BBC News reporter would never invite the audience to ‘imagine being in one of those buildings’ – in Mosul or Baghdad or Gaza, for instance – hit by ‘our’ bombs or those of a major ally, such as Israel.

As with the BBC, so with the Guardian. Consider a Guardian editorial last October highlighting a quote by Assad on Aleppo that he had to:

keep cleaning this area and to push the terrorists to Turkey to go back to where they come from, or to kill them.

The editorial continued:

International diplomacy pays lip service to the idea that such actions are, if proven, war crimes.

And what, then, of Mosul?

The west, too, faces a chance to demonstrate that it does respect the constraints of international law. Soon western-backed Iraqi forces will aim to retake Mosul, Islamic State’s last major stronghold in the country. The conduct of the battle will determine whether victory comes at an unacceptable humanitarian cost.

The Guardian seems to have missed the fact that the West has, for decades, regularly flouted, rather than respected, ‘the constraints of international law’. This blindness and ignorance was already obvious from the title of the Guardian editorial which included the tragi-comic plea, ‘The crimes committed in the wars of the Middle East must in the end be punished. Meanwhile the west must not add to them‘ [our emphasis]; as though the West had not, in fact, already contributed the overwhelming bulk of crimes in the Middle East.

We have not been able to find a single Guardian editorial since October 2016 appraising the US-led assault on Mosul. The contrast with its anguished comments on Aleppo is stark. In June 2016, the paper gave its view on the battle for Aleppo, saying simply: ‘stop it now’, and describing it as ‘an urgent humanitarian catastrophe’.

In October 2016, a Guardian editorial stated that ‘Russian and Syrian warplanes above Aleppo appear to be intentionally targeting civilians’, and demanded the enforcement of international law. And, in November 2016, the Guardian spoke of ‘the West’s grim failure’ to stop ‘a humanitarian and military disaster’. The editorial also noted that:

Russia’s propaganda machine is hard at work alongside the Syrian regime’s, trying to frame these events as the “liberation” of a population described as hostages of Islamic terrorists.

Again, to emphasise, at the time of writing, there has been no Guardian editorial examining whether the ‘victory’ of the US-led coalition in Mosul has ‘come at an unacceptable humanitarian cost’; or exposing the West’s propaganda campaign promoting ‘liberation’. It’s no surprise. After all, that would come too close to demolishing the myth of benevolent Western power; and the Guardian’s own role in propping up the fiction.

Conclusion

Neil Clark rightly observes that:

The very different ways in which the respective ‘liberations’ [of Aleppo and Mosul] were portrayed tells us much about the way war propaganda works in the so-called free world.

The bottom line is that what we are seeing in Iraq, and much of the rest of the world, is an imperial Western project targeting countries that 1) do not conform to the West’s dictates; and 2) are unable to defend themselves adequately (unlike China, Iran or nuclear-armed North Korea, for example).

Clark notes that:

The truth of what has been happening is too shocking and too terrible ever to be admitted in the Western mainstream media. Namely, that since the demise of the Soviet Union, the US and its allies have been picking off independent, resource-rich, strategically important countries one by one.

David Whyte and Greg Muttitt point out that when the UK invaded Iraq, the Middle East country had nearly a tenth of the world’s oil reserves, and that government documents ‘explicitly state’ oil was a motive for the war. But the Chilcot Report shamefully avoided this evidence and ignored oil as a driving force for the invasion.

As Mark Curtis says, after an illegal invasion and one million dead Iraqis, UK trade minister Greg Hands recently had the gall to boast that:

UK companies and brands are already well established in Iraq: from BP and Standard Chartered to G4S and JLR

The minister added:

Iraq has the world’s fourth largest proven oil reserves, sixth largest gas reserves, and huge untapped potential across both.

The minister proclaimed proudly that UK firms are ‘strategically well-placed’ to exploit this massive potential.

Could the real motivation for the 2003 war be any clearer?

Moreover, Perpetual War is a highly lucrative business for arms manufacturers and the military machine in the West. As Bill Van Auken observes:...............'_________________'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.

'An air strike launched by the United States on the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa in northeastern Syria Monday claimed the lives of 42 civilians, 19 of whom were children. It is the bloodiest incident thus far in a ramped-up series of strikes over the past eight days that have killed at least 167 civilians, including 59 children.

The air assault on the Syrian city is the latest stage in a three-month siege waged by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), predominantly made up of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militias, which are being supported by significant numbers of US ground troops. The offensive to force ISIS from its main stronghold has already driven thousands of civilians from their homes, killed hundreds more, and left at least 25,000 stranded with little food and water in Raqqa.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the bombing came a day after numerous civilian casualties were reported Sunday during air attacks. While the SDF claims to have 60 percent of the city under its control, observers speaking to the Financial Times noted that ISIS fighters continue to operate and launch attacks in many parts of the city claimed by the SDF.

The indiscriminate and ruthless assault on the city by the US-led coalition is in line with the vicious assault conducted by Washington and its Iraqi-backed forces earlier this year to recapture the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

In the course of nine months of military operations, an estimated 40,000 civilians lost their lives and an additional one million Iraqis were driven from their homes. These war crimes have been made possible by President Donald Trump’s decision to ease restrictions on engaging in combat, giving military commanders on the ground the power to decide when to launch air strikes and other attacks.

According to AirWars, a London-based monitoring group which collates data on civilian casualties resulting from US-led coalition air strikes, more civilians have died in the seven months since Trump took office than in the close to two-and-a-half years during which Barack Obama oversaw the conflict in the Middle East.

This slaughter is only an indication of what is being prepared for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan announced by Trump Monday night....'_________________'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.

'The Kurdistan region of Iraq, rich with oil resources, has been a bargaining chip for large oil corporations in recent years. Companies have flooded into Kurdistan because of a lack of regulations, relatively cheap oil, export subsidies, and a political willingness shown by the KRG government to cooperate with corporate demands. U.S. involvement in Iraq has been, for some time, shifting around this flow of capital in Iraq with the installation of permanent military bases in Kurdish territory. What is developing in Iraq is a nation that will almost certainly be partitioned, not for the intention of conquering Iraq in the classical sense, but to use Kurdish oil to force the government in Baghdad to loosen public control over its own resources and to slow the rate of social progress. This, of course, has always been the goal sought by the West in Iraq even though Western governments are against Kurdish independence – at least on paper.

The invasion of Iraq

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is widely understood to have been a war fought over resources and not an appeal to human rights; the U.S. supported the government of Saddam Hussein at the height of its brutality in the 1970s until Saddam nationalized oil. This support was so unwavering that the U.S. had actually given Saddam chemical weapons and was complicit as Iraq openly pursued nuclear weapons over a span of two decades. Under President George H.W. Bush, in fact, Iraqi nuclear engineers were invited to the U.S. to receive advanced training on weapons production. It was not until later when Saddam decided to nationalize industries and develop some semblance of a welfare state that the U.S. had a problem with him and his government. That is, when the U.S. government made statements about Saddam’s brutality—these were not lies. However, this is not why they invaded—it was always about Iraq’s natural resources.

After Iraq was destroyed, multinational oil companies had the green light to enter into Iraq to complete their original goal: seizing control of Iraq’s natural resources. In effect, this would make Iraq a client state. However, with a growing relationship with Iran, Iraq began to nationalize and increase regulations on private oil companies, essentially following the Iranian model. The hopes of these large corporations were met with disappointment when Iraq began branched off of the neoliberal economic model. And with the majority of Americans believing that the occupation of Iraq was an abject failure, deploying even more troops to Iraq at this time would have been unthinkable.

When ISIS came on the scene, this provided an opportunity for corporations to put pressure onto Iraq to bend to their will. In order to force Baghdad to do “better” business, oil companies, especially ExxonMobil had begun investing heavily in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. This was so blatant that Reuters ran a report in 2014 exposing the link between ExxonMobil and the Kurds, describing how Exxon had made the Kurdistan region of Iraq what it is now today.

A shift towards the Kurds

ExxonMobil developed a genius tactic with the help of Ali Khedery, an Iraqi-American business mogul, to tap into northern Iraq’s oil, oil that fell under the banner of the Kurdistan Regional Government. At this time, the U.S. was opposed to supporting the Kurds on paper as it was pursuing other objectives in Iraq at the time. However, it is important to note that this shift towards the Kurds happened at the behest of important past and current officials. Despite reports at the time that the U.S. government was “furious” about Kurdish business ties, this was not actually true.

Ali Khedery helped ExxonMobil with this business deal while Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State of the United States, was the CEO of ExxonMobil. At the end of Tillerson’s career at Exxon, Exxon was openly criticizing what they describe as “Iranian influence” in making it harder for them to exploit the people and natural resources of Iraq. Exxon pulled out many of its operations in Kurdistan right before Tillerson took office. He has long been at the center of the public-private revolving door; he sat on policy think tanks alongside top U.S. officials for a very long time, including the Atlantic Council. Other important officials have cashed in on this, including Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US diplomat, who now comfortably sits on the board of RAK Petroleum which has ties to Kurdistan, and has board interlocks with other companies with ties to Kurdistan. Mr. Khalilzad is staunch defender of the Kurds and was on the short list for nomination as Secretary of State in Trump’s administration.

Steve Oshana, Executive Director of A Demand For Action, a political advocacy group fighting for the rights of the Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac people told Al-Masdar that “obviously it was a problem when Tillerson was CEO of Exxon because he undermined the land rights of the Assyrian people. But when Tillerson became Secretary of State, this was a serious problem.” Mr. Oshana continued, “I wouldn’t say that there is a quid pro quo. Certainly he has a preference. At the end of the day, he was the CEO of a company that spends a lot of money donating to candidates and lobbying.”

In a January interview with Christian Today, Oshana commented on Rex Tillerson’s appointment: “As CEO of ExxonMobil Rex Tillerson showed a pattern of disregarding American foreign policy and putting profit ahead of all else. While some may argue this was his duty as a CEO, he also has a duty as an American.

“As our nation’s top diplomat, if confirmed Mr. Tillerson will be charged with the Holy task of defending the rights of my people, and we will never waiver in holding anyone accountable when their actions, whether in the public or private sector, harms our people in our ancestral homeland.” Mr. Oshana was referring to ExxonMobil’s deal with the KRG that expanded oil fields into the Nineveh Plains, the ancestral homelands of the Assyrian nation.

On September 25th, the Kurdistan region of Iraq will hold a referendum to decide if it will formally break way from Iraq or if it will remain under the formal control of the government in Baghdad. Oil companies and other international interests are backing this split, and the KRG government is all in behind them. They KRG government has violated Iraqi law and OPEC treaties in hopes that these large corporations will provide them with the money they need to create their own state. Now, the Kurds are subsidizing exports for large corporations such as DNO International, one of the worst labor abusers in recent memory, in hopes that they will push this referendum through on September 25th. DNO, and other oil companies, could not be happier for it after they have continued their investments in Kurdistan with huge pay offs.

While private money finds its way into Kurdish coffers, the Kurdistan region of Iraq has been long seeing the construction of permanent U.S. military bases, as well as an influx of private military contractors, who will no doubt defend the oil entitlements of these large corporations. Baghdad has openly called these contracts and entitlements illegal. By allowing and passively encouraging this behavior, the U.S. is abandoning Iraq as a sovereign entity. Their interest, analogous to corporate interest, is to control Iraq’s natural resources and privatize capital.

The fact is that the Iraqi Kurds have been reduced to foot soldiers for oil companies, and this could not be worse for the state of Iraq. It remains to be seen how things pan out after the official fall of ISIS, which will be soon, but it appears that the West, headed by the U.S., has no intention of an economically free and independent Iraq. While the U.S. publicly denounces the referendum, no serious attempt has been made to stop it. As they say in American politics – follow the money.'

So the Yanks get their bases and the oil....Iraq is broken up (as per plan), Israel is mightily pleased - Turkey not so pleased._________________'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.

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